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Tim Anderson, "Icons, Idols, A Light Cupped In Clay"

Pimp my casket...

Death of an icon. A cliché that reveals the fallacy behind the iconography of pop culture, because icons by definition are not living things - the only life they have is in the representation of something behind them.

The fakery of icons is one of the reasons we lift up and celebrate "iconoclasts" - the bold personalities who debunk and unmask the celebrities, the powerful, the vain. Indeed, this rebellion against the inauthentic becomes a sort of iconography of its own - James Dean, Elvis (aka "the King"), and eventually his son-in-law and heir to the throne, the King of Pop himself. The "rebel" becomes a type itself, its own establishment, its own empire.

But if we value truth, purity of heart, or that old-fashioned concept of holiness, is there even room for any sort of icon in our lives? Both serious and frivolous people have thought: no - down with icons.

Part of the challenge is the lack of distinction between icons and idols. Some years ago as a student at Regent College, I heard a speaker from the Greek Orthodox tradition talk about the difficulty other Christians had in understanding the presence of icons in his place of worship. Some particularly opinionated persons had taken it on themselves to divest the local Orthodox church of its "idolatry" and broke in one night. They smashed the icons and left the place a mess. The grief in his retelling of these events was not so much in the loss of the objects (though they were significant works of craftsmanship) but in the affront to the sanctity they represented. To kneel in front of an icon, he said, was most properly understood as leaning to look through a window, to look beyond the confines of present space and back to a holy source.

It is easy to see how this point of view dovetails with the contemplative mysticism that has a thread throughout the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Protestants have had more difficulty processing the idea of physical representation of God or his presence. When Reformers took back the elaborately decorated Grote Kerk at the centre of Haarlem in the Netherlands, they resolutely smashed all the carvings off the walls. When visiting a few years ago, I noted that much of the wall space was given over to lists of church authorities and their offices for the past four hundred years, and the floor space to their bodies. The atmosphere was one of funereal status and duty. In one corner a few mutilated panels of the frieze remain, the haunted beauty left as a cautionary example of Catholic venality.

I reverse course.

Idol worship is anti-God. The distinction between the servants of Yahweh and those around them is clarified in the story of Abraham's decisive break with his idol-making father, Terah. According to the Jewish fable, Abram smashes his father's idols (each idol representing a different god), and then leaves a club in the hands of one remaining idol. When Terah asks who has smashed his idols, Abram points to the remaining idol as the culprit. But Terah says this is not possible, as the idols had no capability of such action, they were his own creation.

Abram's rejoinder is a founding insight of the Hebrews:

"If they are dead and made of your own hands, why do you worship them?"

In 2090 BC that observation was a potent argument against idolatry. In 2009 AD, perhaps less so, as we know that we make idols with our own hands, and the process of bringing them down from glory is all part of the game. We simply choose to have the downfallen replaced by another in the ascendant.

Fittingly, we use the word "star" to connote the focus of some sort of light within these persons. As our idols, the "stars" are a luminal expression of our own desire to be seen, to be seen as beautiful, to be in the spotlight and feel its warmth. In our competitive society, the urge to verify our significance is reflected in how we mimic the celebrity world in our celebrations of significant events. To graduate from high school now (in some minds anyway) requires Hollywood-style limousines for the 18 year olds.

Then, the next week, back to flipping burgers. Sic transit gloria. If only the moment could be stored.

In her book "The Gift of Thanks", Margaret Visser details the iconic significance of gifts, and the cultural rites we have set around them. Particularly important, she notes, is the need to photograph, to document with some sort of permanence the moment at which the gift is opened. Even though the gift was bought at Sears with a Mastercard and wrapped in appropriately celebratory paper from the Hallmark store, somehow it represents more at its moment of revelation. By hiding it in the disposable finery of tissue, it gains a tender solemnity.

It is as if we are saying, "I give this to object to you. In the moment of revealing it you must discover something of my feeling toward you."

In a passing anecdote in his book "City of God", Dominique Lapierre tells the story of one family of potters in central India. For generations the skill of making simple clay pots had been passed from father to son. The fragility of the vessels themselves meant that there were significant numbers of new pots and jars needed in the community every year, and so there was a continuing income for the family, and status as an essential support to daily life. Without pottery, there was no access to water . Then one day a salesperson from out of town arrived with a cart. On the back of his cart were stacks of very cheap, almost unbreakable plastic cups and containers. The villagers flocked to the cart and entered the era of plastic. Purchasing a breakable clay jar was instantly a second choice for the impoverished villagers, and in a few moments, a local family-scaled industry that had existed for generations was made superfluous.

Lapierre came to know the family in the years that followed because they had been reduced to living on the streets of Calcutta as beggars.

On a practical level, no one can blame the people of that anonymous village for moving to the ease and convenience of plastic containers. But the transition made both pottery and craftsmen disposable, and cut off a cycle of interaction, service and interdependence that was healthy.

In our increasingly plastic society, we continue to be tempted - not unlike Terah - to store up significance for ourselves in a thousand ways - in reputation, money, objects and knowledge. Perversely, this quest for lasting significance makes the high-maintenance work of relationships dispensable, even undesirable.

Yet the fragility of those moments we spend together in meaningful connection makes them all the more significant. We cannot indefinitely store, as if in plastic, a sense of trust between friends. We cannot "lock in the freshness" of connection to God, so that is summoned up at will, when convenient. No, such things are found only through the tender fumbling of words between us, or perhaps on our knees in a posture of surrender, or as a gift because we were paying attention. Like clean water cupped for a moment in clay, or a light refracted, is the understanding that we are loved. I ask you - is it in some manufactured moment of triumph or instead in moments of true humility that we sense the character and person of God reflected in a person who knows Him?


I mentioned the temptation to take on celebrity personas during celebrations. Recently my daughter Emily was married. It is gratifying to me as I look back now at how she chose to frame "her day". Were there extravagances? Sure, but focused on the inclusive celebration of all those who were participating, not on items that glorified the bride and groom or removed them to a place above everyone else. In fact, when looking at the wedding location Emily and Garrett were very positive about it in general, but did have reservations that the ceremony would take place on a terrace slightly elevated from the congregation.

"It's like everyone will be looking at us!"

That's how it works, honey.

On their wedding day, like it or not, they did become representatives of marriage, and through that, a cause for reflection on the value of relationships in our lives. For me, one of the most significant moments that day came during the sermon, a gracious moment that connected all the meaning within the wedding day to all the purpose of a life lived in love. It was captured on video tape (like the opening of a gift long-awaited) and I transcribe it here.

In his closing remarks, Paul Hughes gave my daughter and her new husband this charge:

"You are both called to receive and release the goodness of God, to live your lives as iconic reminders for all those around you who are watching, who are hungering for more at a spiritual level, who may have lost hope - to remind them that God is good, all the time."

Idols are the signature of an anti-God mentality. Icons are only as worthy as the god they reflect. If we truly desire to diminish the darkness of our world, to hold others as valuable rather than disposable, to fashion our lives in a positive way to a state of permanence, we will have to know that the light we need comes from Christ himself. Knowing this, we will not hoard it, or plasticize it, or (especially) think of it as our own, but "receive and release" it, aware of the numinous power of an iconic life.

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 2 Corinthians 4:6-7

by Tim Anderson

Photo Credits:
Michael Jackson "Pimp my Casket" photo - shyftr.com
Indian Clay pot - licensed from www.istockphoto.com
E & G Wedding photo by Ken Semenuk - www.lightnthedarkness.com

Thanks for the suggestions of my first readers: Janet Anderson, Luci Shaw, Ron Reed, Karen Cooper and Mike Mason.

(c) Tim Anderson 2009

Photos: Tracks, White Rock

Photos: Messing Around With Camera Bag

Lately I've been having fun with the pretty primitive camera on my cell phone, filtering shots through an application called Camera Bag. This is a photo taken last fall in New York with my SLR camera, processed with the different filters available in Camera Bag. Cool.

"The Rhodes," Washington Square, NYC, September 13 2008

Original

Helga

Lolo

Magazine

Instant

Mono

1962

1974

Cinema

Infrared

Fisheye

Photos: Granville Street, Vancouver

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Ron Reed, "Live Theatre"

When the community gathers to witness words becoming flesh, when stories get up onstage and live and move and be, something is happening which has a lot to do with the incarnational essence of the Christian faith. So it is a sad irony that for many centuries Christians have ignored, suspected and even opposed theatrical performance.

To this day I retain powerful sensory impressions of the first professional play I ever experienced, some twenty-five years ago: an adaptation of "Great Expectations." I had seen my share of television, movies, amateur plays, but nothing had prepared me for the transporting immediacy of the professional theatre. A bookworm, I had no idea of the power of the senses to make a story live.

A man lights a pipe onstage, and the blue-gray smoke unfolds and undulates upwards through the stage lights, not a photograph but a real, unhurried, three-dimensioned dance, expanding and dispersing through the space until, most astonishing and un-movie-like of all, that sweet rich tobacco smell reaches my nostrils in the fourteenth row, aisle seat, house right. Six dark men in Victorian crepe brush by me, bearing an ornate coffin through the audience and onto the stage. I see them shake with the palpable weight of that terrible, heavy box, and I too feel the weight of its contents: a human body, death.

Two years later Christ brought the whole world alive to me in a life suddenly abundant with feeling, love, passion, sense. And in some ways, I look back to that first encounter with the heightened reality of the theatrical world as a foretaste of the new life I was soon to experience in Christ.

It is the very power of theatre, and in particular its sensual power, that has led some Christians to be suspicious. When a false dualism splits the spiritual from the physical and distrusts the body, when we forget that scripture uses "the flesh" to refer not to our sensual selves but rather to our anti-spiritual tendencies, when a Word-centred religion forgets that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, then passion and feeling and the senses become suspect.

But to the biblical Christian, our bodies bear the image and likeness of our Maker, and they are to be celebrated and used to His glory. The creation itself is God-made, and should delight us as much as it did our Creator, who kept on saying "Look at that! Isn't it great!" at the end of each day's creating. And so theatre, that most physical, sensual, immediate and incarnational of arts, is to some Christians the most thrillingly divine of them all.

The theatre artist is fascinated by the particularities of human life, with people and the dynamic of their relationships, with the human heart and the way it reveals itself in choices and action. By shaping this fascination into a story on stage, the artist performs a priestly act of oblation - a sanctifying act of thanksgiving, an offering up to God. (Capon, pg 79)

Theatre is an ultimately collaborative art form, welcoming every kind of artist to work together to make something greater. The storyteller, the composer, the visual artist, the dancer and the carpenter work together in an intentional community with a mission of service to an audience - a simulacrum of any kind of community, of the church, of the body of Christ. The actor dare not say to the stage manager, "I don't need you." And except the electrician run the dimmer up on cue, who will see the truths conceived in the heart of the director and expressed in the bodies of the players?

When our God took on flesh and became a man, he was a man who mostly told stories. And in this, theatre artists have much in common with Jesus, because the art of theatre is above all else the art of storytelling, elaborated.

In the twentieth century, literary fiction has shifted its emphasis away from plot toward point of view, narrative voice, other things. But that is one thing its crowd-pleasing cousin can never do: without story, what happens on a stage becomes something other than drama. It may be dance, it may be music, it may be poetry or circus, but it's not a play.

And like Christ or the prophet Nathan (II Samuel 12), whose stories got inside people and revealed their hearts, these stage-stories too have a way of getting past rational defences and straight to the listener's core. Hamlet knew it: when he needed to test his step-father's soul, he hired a band of players to put on a show. "The play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

In our world there has grown up a terrible misconception about the nature of the actor's task. We think it is all about ego, about putting the actor forward, about showing off, about wanting to be centre-stage. (Isn't it interesting how this mistrust of acting has crept into our language? We're paying no compliment when we say people are making a spectacle of themselves, feeding you a line, doing their same old routine, putting on an act, acting up, showing off, making a scene, playing a role...) But many Christian actors find something profoundly spiritual in the discipline of setting their own persona aside, submitting themselves to the task of so identifying with another human soul that they can take on that person's way of speaking, moving, feeling, thinking, wanting. Like John the Baptist, they must diminish so that the other might be manifested.

Far more apt is the comparison to Christ himself, who Paul describes in Philippians as one who, having the form and nature of God, didn't consider equality with God a thing to be held onto, but emptied himself, taking on the character of a servant, the physicality of a human being. It is a poor actor indeed who simply pretends to be another character: who settles for seeming to be, rather than identifying with and imaginatively becoming that character. The actor builds this new person out of a miraculous confluence of two beings: the character who already exists in the script, created by the playwright, and the actor's own self - feelings, desires, history, body, soul. The resulting character is neither fully fictional nor fully real, but mysteriously both fictional and real. The actor aspires to think the thoughts of the character while in the scene, not to know more about the play than the character would in the moment: even so, the actor never actually "becomes the character" - always the actor remains himself, living out an expression of some aspect of her own self within different circumstances.

How reminiscent of Christ, fully man and yet still God. Not that the actor does exactly what Jesus did in his incarnation: only that, in emptying ourselves and taking the character of another, we taste at least a little of the divine humility of our Lord.

And what a concrete lesson this is in our common humanity. Knowing that, in different circumstances and with different choices, I could be a disciple, a Nazi, a hooker, a sage or an accountant. If you are going to embody someone, you cannot hold yourself above them, hold them at arms' length: you have to climb into their body, taste their food, imagine their childhood, fear what they fear and want what they want. A profoundly spiritual act, an act of identification, an act of love.

In recent decades there has been a tremendous explosion among Christians of interest in theatre. When in the 1960s evangelical Christians became less separationist and began to experience the culture around them, that whole subculture began to realize that such a powerful medium might just as well be used for the Kingdom of God as against it.

In recent years, as Christian theatre artists grow in their craft and become more sophisticated in their understanding of it, many turn from this utilitarian approach to a more incarnational, story-telling aesthetic, believing that the theatre speaks most powerfully, and is most transcendent, when it is not harnessed to a pragmatic purpose. The Christian playwright who in her early career sets out to teach people things by using the stage eventually comes to the conclusion that her focus needs to be on telling a tale, not manifesting a moral. And that in the process of creating that story, the creator's image will be seen. In writing a play from the heart, the playwright's heart will be made known: by the choices she makes, by the choices her characters make and by the consequences they experience. If that heart is filled with God's Spirit, then the play will be similarly filled.

We go to the theatre to have experiences which are not our own, to be made larger. We identify with characters we might never otherwise meet, we see worlds we will never live in. In a highly concentrated, artistically rendered universe, characters strive and make choices and live out consequences before our eyes in the space of a couple hours, and sometimes that experience takes us outside ourselves so profoundly that we leave the theatre changed: knocked off our "onological treadmill," we are suddenly open to new ways of seeing the world. And, possibly, we find ourselves in "a position where we may more easily contact God, or be contacted by him." (Baron)

Some theatre artists are quite intentional about this. By creating works which challenge our complacent and conventional assumptions, while refusing to "explain themselves away" by offering interpretation, they force us to do our own wrestling with fundamental assumptions. This can be a prophetic act in the Old Testament tradition. "What art does is to reorient and repattern perception, creating the conditions for a new epistemology. What the prophetic does is similar." (Fetcho)

Humans learn, change and grow mostly through what they experience. In theatre, we experience vicariously a great deal that our own lives will never bring about. With the Holy Spirit working in us as we come to terms with these experiences, the theatre affords an extraordinary opportunity to grow and become more human, to become wiser and more compassionate as we are transformed by our experiences - whether actual or vicarious.

from "The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity" (1997), ed. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens

*

Gerald Baron, "A Crisis Encounter: Can Art Make It Happen?", Christianity Today, June 6 1980.

Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering Of Uncles: The Priesthood Of Adam And The Shape Of The World (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

David Fetcho, "Art, Action, And Revival", Radix, Summer 1985.

Photos: Granville Island

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Photos: Orlando

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R. Crumb, "The Book Of Genesis"

"The cover of R. Crumb's newest work, an illustrated version of The Book Of Genesis, contains a warning label: "ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS." Crumb says that he wanted to preven tpeople from thinking, Oh, a Bible comic book; I'll give it to my kid! . . . Crumb was brought up Catholic and was familiar with the basic Bible stories. . . . Crumb, who says he suspects that God exists, is broadly curious about the spiritual forces in the universe. He occasionally turns to Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of Thomas for spiritual guidance, but he thinks it would be crazy to try to find any spiritual meaning in Genesis: 'It's much too primitive.' "


Francoise Mouly, The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009

Robert Iger, "My Quiet Time"

"Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively?
A. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It's a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I'm already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I'll do that in the morning, too, when I'm exercising and watching the news."

Robert Iger, C.E.O. of Disney
New York Times, May 2, 2009

anthony lane | not a mike leigh film

If you arrived late for TERMINATOR: SALVATION and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns . . . The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives and, when in doubt, pick whichever is loudest . . . 

Take John Connor, played by Christian Bale as a scar-nicked warrior, consumed by a messianic belief that he can save the world by shouting. After the opening battle, he answers his radio with yelps of "Here!" and "Connor!" as though introducing himself to a befuddled and very deaf grandmother . . . 

When, and on what possible ground, did someone decide that the Terminator franchise should be no fun to watch? It's surely not a good sign when time travel gives you a sense of deja vu. . . . 

The title is unfortunate, giving the impression—which is more than borne out by the film—that something must be done to save the franchise . . . 

With a brief cameo by a C.G.I. version of Arnold Schwarzenegger; or maybe this is him, and the virtual one is governing California.

Anthony Lane, 

The New Yorker, June 1 and 8, 2009

Ron Reed, "YOU STILL CAN'T as Oblation"

I love the idea of oblation. Fact is, I live by it.

The moment in a worship service when the priest takes common elements, bread and wine, lifts them up to God with words of thanksgiving, and they come down blessed. Transformed, somehow. By the simple act of noticing and lifting up, by the thanks, by being held up in the presence of something holy.

That's what "You Still Can't" is, to me. An act of oblation. Many acts of oblation, in fact – hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny pieces of the world around me, noticed and celebrated and offered up.

My friends, my family, my enthusiasms. Common elements, to be sure, but somehow sacred. And rendered all the moreso, for me, by the simple act of noticing, and taking up, and reshaping into something new.

So many of the characters in the play are themselves enthusiasts, lovers, gatherers, priests. Seeing that what's around them, the stuff of the ordinary world, is shot through with the grandeur of God. I love the way they let other more mundane considerations drop away in single-minded pursuit of what they love – and in so doing, I think, taste something of the Kingdom of God.

If that seems too much to lay on so slight and silly a play, I'm okay with that. If we can give you a couple enjoyable hours, a few laughs in the presence of friends, that'll be plenty.

And you'll forgive me if I consider that something sacred.

Ron

You Still Can't, written and directed by Ron Reed, runs until June 13 at Pacific Theatre. It's a 50-years-later companion piece to You Can't Take It With You, but just so you know - you don't need to have seen the Kaufman and Hart original to thoroughly enjoy this stand-alone sequel.

B. Smaller, "Most Spiritual"

Barbara Smaller, The New Yorker, May 11, 2009

John Updike, "Plot and Theology"

What if you think that the narrative art derives its value and importance - its ethical status - from its imitation of reality, from its truthfulness to our mundane human condition? Then plot is justifiable only to the extent that reality itself can be said to have a plot, a design: plot becomes a philosophical and,indeed, a theological question. For the Greeks, plot traces the vengeance of the gods, often working their will through human passions. For Christians, plot echoes divine Providence and its ultimate justice. In "My Literary Passions" Howells recalled his youthful reading of Dickens:

While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best . . . and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life . . . In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.

Howells' fiction, however, reveals little instinctive belief that merit will in fact be corwned with success and that the real world must conform itself to the ideal. Raised rather haphazardly as a Swedenborgian, in an Ohio saturated with Protestant piety, he slowly but thoroughly became an agnostic, and , in his middle life, turned to Tolstoy and socialism in lieu of a supernatural faith. Purposefully, then, and not from any mere aesthetic disdain of flashy effectism, his fiction is formless, and was sensed as such by his contemporaries.

by John Updike
from a critical essay on William Dean Howells, July 13, 1987

William Hazlitt on style in criticism

"Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts. But to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task."
William Hazlitt

Walton Ford on Art and Illustration

Ford said that he was interested in fudging the line between art and illustration; a lot of great art was illustration, and vice versa, depending on the degree of skill and imagination the artist brought to it. But there was another factor, too, and it involved the viewer's participation. "Norman Rockwell wanted to tackle civil rights," Ford said. "So what does he do? He does a painting from the point of view of a little black girl in a perfect Sunday dress, and there's a tomato splashed on the wall right near her head, and two U.S. marshals' legs on either side of her, and you have only one place to go - you're stuck with Norman Rockwell's interpretation. Some people love it, because you're off the hook, everyone understands it right away. Illustration can be a starting point, but to become art it has to open up and allow for other interpretations - then you get the kind of work I love most."

from "Man And Beast: The narrative art of Walton Ford" by Calvin Tomkins
The New Yorker, January 26. 2009

Norman Rockwell, "The Problem We All Live With"

Balanchine: Only God, Only a Flower

One of the most celebrated Banachinisms, "God creates, man assembles," is an adaptation of a saying attributed to Glinka, "Nations create music, composers only arrange it," and it is a question whether Balanchine or Stravinsky said it first. The word "assmelbe" is a synonym for "compose," which literally means "put together." Balanchine was speaking not only for composers and choreographers but for all "creative" human beings. We put things together that already exist; we cannot creat out of nothing - only God creates ex nihilo. It is the thought expressed in John 1:3: "Without Him was made nothing that has been made."

In countless interviews, Balanchine deplored the tendency of some members o f the audience to attach meanings to dance gesture, and he always used the same metaphor: "When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, 'What do you mean? What is your significance?' Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing."

These statements were all loose renderings of the Acmeist manifesto, one of the prime documents of Russian symbolist poetry. The Acmeist poets rebelled against the previous generation's use of prepackaged symbolism. Sergei Gorodetsky, 1913: "For the Acmeists, a rose has again become beautiful in itself, for its petals, fragrance, and color, and not for its purported likeness to mystical love or something else."

from "Balanchine Said" by Arlene Croce
The New Yorker, January 26, 2009

Billy Collins, "The Afterlife"

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.


from "Questions About Angels" by Billy Collins

Ron Reed, "Orchid Thief, from Susan Orleans: Part One"

Orchid Thief

from Susan Orleans

Part One

a tall guy, skinny as a stick,
pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome.
he is missing all his front teeth.

passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs

the posture of al dente spaghetti
the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games

the late-sleeping, heavy-smoking, junk-food-eating, law-bending type
folding virtue and criminality around profit

a shrewd bastard.

*

"swamp" and "orchids" and "Seminoles" and "cloning" and "criminal" –
I arranged to go down to Naples to see if this ball of paper might bloom.

New York, the dead center of winter.
In Naples it was warm and gummy.

a frayed Florida bungalow

"When it rains here, cars start to fly."

the creaking of wooden benches
the sound of some guy in the front row gunning his throat

*

the Fakahatchee Strand
the Big Cypress Swamp
the Loxahatchee
Brighton
Immokalee
Tampa
Big Cypress
Hollywood.
Hollywood is the most urban of them all.

a beautiful spruced-up golf course
grass as green and flat as a bathmat
hedges precision-shaped and burnished
the whole thing as civilized as a tuxedo
LADIES! BEWARE OF THE GATORS ON THE GREENS!

Miccosukee Indians
Buster Baxley
Vinson Osceola
Chief Billie, James E. Billie
John Laroche:
"I'm really on the side of the plants.
I'm a shrewd bastard.
I could be a great criminal."

mannequins
canoes
Styrofoam mountains
actual furniture
a talk show about how to keep pet snakes and iguanas happy
Carpet-Marts and
Toy-Marts and
Car-Marts and
the turnoff for Alligaor Alley
dreamy-sounding Florida towns like
Plantation and
Sunrise and
Coconut Creek and
Coral Springs

Laroche was encouraged by both the palm fronds
and Chief Billie's panther.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe.
Then I find myself in Florida.

*

"I really have to watch myself
especially around plants."

hoyas:
tough, rubbery leaves and
long, loopy vines

enormous tropical trees
with pimply bark and flowers the color of bubble gum

Peruvian odontoglossums

Cryptanthus, a genus of Brazilian bromeliad

a spectacular six-foot-tall Anthuriaum vietchii
with weird, corrugated leaves,
"a gorgeous, gorgeous son of a bitch"

spiral juniper bushes
cracker roses
confetti shrub
teddy bear palms

"weird-ass vegetables":
spinach that grows on vines
African pumpkins that can be trained onto trellises
carrots that grow in pots
Chinese fuzzy gourds
yard-long green beans
pink Zairean hot peppers shaped like penises
"Screw wax myrtles!"
"Screw saw grass!"

Live wild or die.

*

orchids:
a German shepherd dog with its tongue sticking out
an onion
an octopus
a human nose
the kind of fancy shoes that a king might wear
Mickey Mouse

"Orchids appeared to have been modelled in the wildest caprice."

One looks like a monkey.
One looks dead.
There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men.
Some look like the results of an accident involving paint.

The genus Dracula is blackish-red and looks like a vampire bat.
The texture of human flesh.

*

Orchids grow slowly. They languish.

seeds blown from South America to Florida
will drop in swimming pools and barbecue pits
and on shuffleboard courts and gas stations,
on roofs of office buildings and on the driveways of fast-food restaurants,
and in hot sand on a beach and in your hair on a windy day,
swept away or stepped on or drowned without being felt or seen.

"They are hot and moist in operation,
under the dominion of Venus,
and provoke lust exceedingly."

*

Polyradicion lindenii,
the ghost orchid.

Polyrrhiza lindenii
the Fakahatchee's ghost orchid,
looks like a ghost but has also been describes as
a bandy-legged dancer,
a white frog,
a fairy
"They look like a man,
like a woman,
sometimes like an austere, sinister fighter,
sometimes like a clown who excites our laughter.
They represent the image of a lazy tortoise,
a melancholy toad,
an agile, ever-chattering monkey."

"Should one be lucky enough to see a flower,
all else will seem eclipsed."

*

thirty thousand orchids belonging to a man in Palm Beach all died.
He began what his family called "a downhill slide."
He was arrested for attacking his father,,
then for firing a sixteen-gauge shotgun into a neighbor's house,
then for carrying a concealed knife,
pistol,
and shotgun.
"It was the death of his orchids. That’s where it all began."

Live wild or die.

drowned on a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River
fell to his death while hunting in Sierra Leone
lost while orchid hunting in Panama
died of dysentery in Bogota
murdered in Mexico, killed in Madagascar, shot dead in Rio Hacha.
died of fever in Ecuador, gunned down by locals in Brazil,
vanished without a trace in Asia
murdered

Live wild or die.

eaten by a tiger
drenched with oil and burned alive
vanished into thin air
walked for fourteen days through jungle mud and never was seen again
fever or accidents or malaria or foul play
trophies for headhunters

or prey for horrible creatures:
flying yellow lizards
diamondback snakes
jaguars
ticks
stinging marabuntas
other orchid hunters

*

On my first walk in the swamp
I saw oaks and pines and cypress and pop ash and beauty-berry and elderberry and yellow-eyed grass and camphor weed

I saw strap lilies and water willows
and sumac and bladderwort,
and resurrection ferns springing out of a fallen dead tree

The Fakahatchee Strand
hot and wet and buggy
cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes

bromeliads:
bright red and green and shaped like fright wigs
some were spider-sized, some were as big as me
sheeny leaves
like a crowd of animals, watching everything that passed.

heavy sweet smell
standing water
stillness and darkness and thickness
trees sweaty
leaves slick
whatever isn't wet is blasted.

a carpet of lubber grasshoppers so deep
the variety of squirrels
the number of charred Model T's
the crackling of the gravel paths
the mumbling of leaves in the wind, the squeak of doors
the abstract tropical animal sounds of ticking and cheeping and crying
like sounds inside a covered bowl

The light was flattening out.

"The place looked wild and lonely.
About three o'clock it seemed to get on Henry's nerves
and we saw him crying,
he could not tell us why,
he was just plain scared."

The air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet.


by Ron Reed, 

from "The Orchid Thief" by Susan Orleans

Charles Bukowski, "Alone With The Gods"

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery -- isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."

Charles Bukowski

Sex & Zen & A Bullet In The Head

I am so damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.

Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.

Noodles? Forget it! Try my fist!

Gun wounds again?

Same old rules, no eyes, no groin.

Sex fiend, you'll never get reincarnated!

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries.

Damn, I'll burn you into a BBQ chicken!

I'll cut your fats out, don't you believe it?

Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants.

Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?

Quiet or I'll blow your throat up.

We are nearly blown up in pieces. You deserve that. It's because you're civil servants.

Suck the coffin mushroom now.

You're petulant, but not concentrated enough.

You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken.

I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!

He's Big Head Man, he is lousing around!

You daring lousy guy.

You bastard, try this melon

Beat him out of recognizable shape!

I have been scared shitless too much lately.

I got knife scars more than the number of your leg's hair!

Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.

How can you use my intestines as a gift?

Damn you, stink man

The bullets inside are very hot.
Why do I feel so cold?

Hong Kong film subtitles
collected in "Sex & Zen & A Bullet In The Head"
Stefan Hammond, MIke Wilkins, editors

Stephen Adly Guirgis, "Judgement Day"

"God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame,
reciting by heart the poems you would have written,
had your life been good."

from The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
by Stephen Adly Guirgis